What ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ gets right about enchantment
I made my first trip to the cinema at five years old.
It’s one of my earliest memories. I remember a dark, brooding room, with one wall alight with colours and shapes. I remember seeing a funny little floor lamp bounce onto the screen and squish the letter ‘i’ of ‘Pixar’ under its big clunky foot. Comedy at its finest for a 5-year-old.
‘Monsters Inc’ was the film on show that day. I don’t remember much from that maiden viewing, but I know I spent most of it in wide-eyed awe. I was completely under its spell.
Since then, as I reflect on that experience 20 years later, I have seen many films. But few of them have left me with the same wide-eyed wonder that Monsters Inc can give a five-year-old. In fact, after a decade-long diet of Marvel superhero movies and disappointing spinoffs, it would be fair to say that I went through a period of feeling a bit disenchanted with the moviegoing experience. Modern blockbusters seemed to have revolved around mindless spectacle and big-screen crossovers for a few too many years, and it’s all gotten a bit tiresome. You can throw as many comic book superheroes on a screen as you want, but it all starts to feel a bit beige after a while, doesn’t it?
But now – something has changed; there’s been a ‘disturbance in the Force, ’ if you will. Last night I went to the cinema and watched ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’, and I found myself feeling that wide-eyed awe that 5-year-old Wallace felt many moons ago. I think the best way I can describe what I’m feeling is ‘re-enchantment’. And this is why I believe that Across the Spider-Verse has something important to teach us about life.
Across the Spider-Verse has a lot going for it. A compelling story arc, voice acting that puts most live-action performances to shame, and some perfectly pitched gags. It's character-driven, emotional stuff while still finding time to beat up some bad guys and see Miles Morales’ version of Spider-Man wrestle with the teenage angst and drama that has always been central to the character. If that’s not enough, it’s got an ending that will leave you thirsty for more. Honestly, I think this could be The Empire Strikes Back for a new generation – it’s that good.
It has to be said, though – I don’t think any of these compliments that I could give it are the reason I find myself feeling re-enchanted in its wake. For me, the beating heart of this movie is not in any magnetic point in its story, nor is it in the emotion between characters and family on screen. The triumph in this movie is less about content and more about form.
We’ve seen plenty of animated movies in our day, but we’ve never seen anything that could hold a candle to the visual style and aesthetic of Across the Spider-Verse. It is stunningly beautiful. Every single frame is a painting. I can’t recall ever seeing a more painterly movie, one so unashamed in its departure from the conventional, tried-and-true Pixar/DreamWorks art style and so original in its field. This is where the enchantment of Across the Spider-Verse lies. It refuses to settle for the beige modernity showcased in every other blockbuster that will be trotted out in theatres this summer. You might think you’re getting a ticket to sit and watch a superhero movie, but I’d argue you’re paying for an almost avant-garde, meta modern art exhibition. It’s beautiful, it’s breath-taking, but it’s also strange and subversive.
These are some of the ingredients for an elixir of enchantment. And enchantment today is something our world has been starved of.
Our culture and society in 2023 have been thoroughly disenchanted. Enlightenment, modernity, and increasingly stale religious sentiment have left us with a world that we can, supposedly, fully explain. Science gives us the answers, doesn’t it? The years of needing a deity or a god to explain natural phenomena or give us societal structure and morals are relegated to the past. There are no spirits haunting your house, no afterlife to float about in after death, and no spiritual significance to be found behind the important moments of your life.
The disenchantment is wide-reaching in many aspects of the public sphere. Sex has been disenchanted and liberated by culture from the religious prudishness which kept it boxed up and hidden away for generations (yet sexuality is also paradoxically enchanted by culture and viewed as the source of human identity and ultimate satisfaction).
Even those who cling to religion can find that their version of God seems to be thoroughly devoid of anything at odds with 21st century Western and secular sensibilities. If there is a God, he/she probably holds all the same convictions about politics and social issues as I do, and he/she definitely would not ask me to rearrange the furniture of my life to any taxing degree. Christianity can easily become a dish served fast and en masse like a McDonald's drive-through order.
There’s no ‘wonder’ out there anymore. Heralding this realisation, the ‘new atheists’ of the 2010s told us that the sooner we accept the meaninglessness of our lives, the better.
I guess you could say I’ve experienced a similar cycle of enchantment and disenchantment with my moviegoing habits. The awe I experienced watching Monsters, Inc. in 2001 slowly faded into cynicism and contempt somewhere along the line.
Back in the day, CS Lewis wrote a short reflection on ‘enchantment’ called ‘Talking about Bicycles’. He chronicles how a child will move through 4 stages of awareness towards a bike. The first stage is ‘the Unenchanted Age’, where bikes don’t really mean anything to a child at all. The second stage is the ‘Enchanted Age’, wherein mastering a bicycle makes it the most divine and glorious object in the universe. What could be better than rushing down a steep hill on a bicycle and feeling the wind in your hair? After a few years of this, though, the child will undoubtedly slip into the third, ‘Disenchanted Age’, where bicycles lose their magic and mysticism. They’re boring! We don’t really care about them anymore.
Our society has slipped into a ‘Disenchanted Age’. Not in relation to bicycles, but in relation to spirituality, and therefore enchantment itself. We don’t really care for it these days.
But there’s a fourth stage that Lewis writes about – the ‘Re-enchanted Age’ – and this is something akin to what I felt whilst watching Across the Spider-Verse. There comes a stage in every person’s life when they see a bike for what it truly is. They may realise some of the misconceptions they had about it before, and instead see it for the true beauty it inherently holds. Riding a bicycle becomes exciting again.
Who doesn’t love the sound of that? Probably quite a few of us have felt the re-enchantment of hopping back on a bicycle or a skateboard as adults, with a wave of nostalgia and excitement washing over us.
But this leaves us with a nagging question: can anything actually offer us ‘re-enchantment’ on a whole-of-life scale? Is there really any ‘deep magic from the dawn of time’ that could make life beautiful and mysterious and exciting again? Modern society would tell us that we need to get used to the disenchantment – but do we?
I believe that the Gospel of Jesus offers re-enchantment to our secularised lives. Perhaps that seems like a bit of a leap too far to you. Seriously? A fusty old white man’s religion? I’d forgive you for thinking that as a culture, we’ve seen more than enough of what Christianity is supposedly about, and that there’s nothing there that we’d even want to be re-enchanted by.
And yet, as I read the Bible for myself, I’m confronted by the mystery of it all. The biblical authors talk about the ‘profound mystery’ of Jesus and his Church. One passage goes as far to say that ‘even angels long to look into these things’. This sounds like enchantment to me.
Jesus, the infinite God who comes intimately close, is the antidote to a society unanchored and adrift in a post-modern colosseum of ideas. He offers depth, enchantment and – dare I say it – magic to a world that wishes all that stuff they read about in books as a kid was true. Not a ‘Hobbits and horcruxes’ kind of magic, but a deeply knowable, revealed truth of the remarkable love of God.
Slowly, some voices are realising that the ‘embrace death and get on with it’ mantra of the new atheists doesn’t really cut the mustard. David Baddiel, part of a cohort of what some are describing as new ‘new atheists’, said this in his recent book, ‘The God Desire’:
“My argument, on the other hand, is, in a general sense, psychological. It requires an admission, which, frankly, most atheists, I’ve noticed, aren’t prepared to make. Which is: I love God.”
Baddiel is honest about the human and universal longing for enchantment or for God, even if he believes this longing cannot be satisfied.
What’s more, historian Tom Holland (a confusing name to bring up in a Spider-Man article for sure), who is also not (yet) a Christian, recently said this of the Christian faith:
“I crave the enchantment. A Christianity that has bled itself of enchantment is a pallid and an anaemic thing.”
For those of us who believe in Jesus, we can truly say to folks like David Baddiel: good news! Not only do you love the idea of God, but God also loves you too. (Credit to Krish Kandiah in this fabulous article for that remark)
To the Tom Holland’s of the world, we can also say: good news! This world is enchanted. ‘The whole world is filled with His Glory’, after all.
As followers of Jesus, our task is to go out and offer re-enchantment to our friends and neighbours. To accomplish such a task, I believe we could do worse than take some of our cues from Across the Spider-Verse.
Are we willing to depart from the tried-and-true evangelism ‘methods’ that have worked in the past? Have we shown Jesus in all his true beauty? God’s Word says that ‘strength and beauty are in His sanctuary’ – do our friends know this? Maybe that truth needs to sink into our own hearts a bit first – do we know this?
It’ll take more than us just showing the beauty of the gospel, though – are we living a strange and unexpected Christian life? God has chosen us to be a peculiar people, exiles in Babylon, who should have something odd and magnetic about them. Is there something curiously different about our lives? Perhaps our attitudes to the outsider, to the community or the grace we extend to our neighbour? Do we see how Jesus subverts our expectations of what we expect our Lord and Saviour to be like?
All of these reflections lead me to thank God for the redeeming work of re-enchantment. Both in superhero movies and in the real world.
Much ink has already been spilt on the creative imagination it takes to quietly reinvent the wheel as these Spider-Verse movies have. Check out this video for a great explanation of just how disruptive its animated style is, or this video for insight into how meta-modern movies change things up compared to their modern/post-modern predecessors.
For an extended conversation about the re-enchantment that Christianity offers, check out this podcast with Tom Holland.
